This afternoon I walked back to Villespassans from Combebelle, the sky grey and occasionally sheeting, but the vines beautiful and still green at the bottom of the valley, but tending to red, yellow, gold, russet, saffron, crimson on the hills. Between the rows spring up pungent sprays of wild lavender and rosemary, counterpointed by the wizened grapes that wither on the remaining shoots, and a prevailing aura of decay... Half way down the ridge, I sat on a rock, dangling my feet over a precipice, and, cracking an acorn open with my fingernails, found two fat white maggots stirring in the brown flesh... The poorly camouflaged hulk of what I had taken to be a shipping container on a low hill by the road turned out to be an old tour bus, still faintly discernible on the side the illustration of a blues band with the legend 'Dixie Originals', an address in Holland, the windows smashed, the tyres stripped... On a grave in the cemetery rested a small brass crucifix: I lifted it up, and discovered fierce, brightly-coloured wasps nesting in the hollow wound of Jesus' cast back...

Most of the tanks at Maris are empty now - there is little work to be done. Eight tanks at Combebelle remain, but the lease on our gite expires in a week. Noone has said anything about our timings. I am looking forward to leaving - but not as much as I enjoyed arriving. I left London beneath a cloud, but she calls me back - every day I hear of new events that can only occur within her - here, I am bereft, excommunicated. 'Londres', in French, means both the city and 'fog', her eternal mystery. Terriblis hic locus iste. This place is terrible - as God is terrible: awe-inspiring, mighty, loved...

Miller: "I am pouring the juice of the grape down my gullet and I find wisdom in it, but my wisdom is not born of the grape, my intoxication owes nothing to wine..."

I love everything that is flowing, and I shall search for it and sing it out, in every page of every book that riffles in the wind on unstable trestles under the bridges of the city, in the heart of flowers, dripping with nectar, in the juice of the honeysuckle stem that I suckle at, in the core of acorns and oak-apples, in the hollow back of bronze-cast effigies in country churchyards, under stones in the wet caverns behind waterfalls, in the stink and the mud and the mire of fields and roadways, in the sun on red brink with the blue sky behind, in orifices and on open plains. The world expands with my enquiries: contracts to illustrate a point. All that flows, flows within and through me, beneath me like the river from a high and ancient bridge, above like the stars that rush above, marking long nights of travel. All that is seen and touched ignites me and itself, evaporating, boiling away and upwards, into me. Passion, pain, intrigue and confusion, joy, anger and forgetfulness, the soul in motion, rolling the bones along the way, rolling over everything and gathering it up - I will be alone, I alone will wander among the unseeing multitude, I alone will gaze upon the Master's work and wonder. For me the museums and galleries are already turning inside out, spilling their guts on the avenues, the public buildings are already great breasts and cocks, are cups filled with blood and sperm. The cars and the buses leap and twirl, flow to my imaginings. My blood is in ferment, the very passage of time intoxicates me. Awake, sleeper, and behold! It is the mind that makes of this moment a dull prison, and the mind, allowed to flow, which breaks the door, admits the light, sees more clearly than the sharpest eye, translates, transmogrifies.